Steve Jobs, the brilliant, mercurial co-founder of Apple Inc. who introduced simple, elegantly designed computers for people who are more interested in what technology could do rather than how it was done, died Oct. 5 at age 56.

In a brief statement, Apple announced the death but did not say where he died. He suffered from a rare form of pancreatic cancer and had a liver transplant in 2009, and he stepped down as Apple’s chief executive officer on Aug. 24, 2011.
Apple says the company's co-founder Steve Jobs has died. He was 56. In a brief statement the company said Jobs died Wednesday. He had been battling pancreatic cancer. (Oct. 5)

The world, Mr. Jobs also reinvented the portable music player with the iPod, launched the first successful legal method of selling music online with the creation of iTunes, and reordered the cellphone market with the wildly popular iPhone. The introduction of the iPad also jump-started the electronic tablet market and now dominates the field.

He also started a highly successful chain of retail stores and almost single-handedly pushed consumers away from their dependence on floppy disks and CDs.
Cool, charismatic and calculating that people would be willing to pay a premium price for products that signal creativity, Mr. Jobs had a genius for understanding the needs of consumers before they did.
He knew best of all how to market. “Mac or PC?” became one of the defining questions of the late 20th century and although Apple sold a mere 5 percent of all computers in that era, Mac users became rabid partisans and dedicated to Mr. Jobs.
Mr. Jobs was the first crossover technology star, turning Silicon Valley renown to Main Street recognition, and paving the way for the rise of the nerds such as Yahoo founders Jerry Yang and David Filo, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.
As a 21-year-old college-dropout-entrepreneur, Mr. Jobs led Apple to multimillion-dollar success in five years. Forced out of his own company by the time he was 30, he started another computer firm, NeXT, whose technology was used to create the World Wide Web. Mr. Jobs also took over a foundering computer animation company and turned it into the Academy Award-winning Pixar, maker of “Toy Story,” “Finding Nemo” and “A Bug’s Life.” He returned to save Apple from near-certain oblivion in his 40s, radically cutting the product line and restoring the company to both profitability and leadership in innovation.
Known within the technology community for his complex and combative temperament, Mr. Jobs, a famously private man, had kept his pancreatic cancer diagnosis and surgery secret for more than a year, asserting that his preference for personal privacy outweighed the rights of shareholders to know about his health. He revealed the news in a June 2005 commencement address at Stanford University. He later became furious at speculation over his health in mid-2008, when he appeared in public looking gaunt. In late 2008, he took a medical leave from the company and had a liver transplant the following year.

The end was inevitable with the cancer ravaging his body. Today was his final day to fight the battle. His name and legacy will live on forever. He truly changed the world as we know it. Unfortunately, no technology could save him from the cancer that destroyed his life form.

The end was inevitable with the cancer ravaging his body. Today was his final day to fight the battle. His name and legacy will live on forever. He truly changed the world as we know it. Unfortunately, no technology could save him from the cancer that destroyed his life form.

....he will live on in the afterlife and we may be able to talk or converse with him when we pass as well....